Exposition: Poupées impromptues et saugrenues

Impromptu and Absurd Dolls

The Galerie du Père Bonnet brings together eighty artists for an exceptional exhibition centered on the figure of the doll. After discovering Impromptu Dolls in December 2024 at the Cellier des Chanoines in Lodève and meeting Daredo, it became clear that the project deserved to be extended: by selecting part of the works presented and opening it up to other artists from diverse backgrounds.
To the impromptu dolls produced in a Lodève-based workshop were thus added so-called absurd dolls.

Traditionally, the doll functions as a tool of social assignment, mentally and technically conditioning young girls for their future role as mothers. She is meant to cuddle, style, dress, feed, rock, and put to bed this little plastic mannequin — a set of learned gestures serving the complacent satisfaction of a patriarchal society.
Girls are given dolls and prams; boys get marbles, toy cars, and air rifles.

Fortunately, things do not always unfold as intended. A certain childish sadism often emerges: dismemberment, torn-off arms and legs, hair shorn, eyes pierced — all sorts of little delights that now give us great pleasure. This playful violence also fuels the imagination of many artists who, in the wake of Hans Bellmer, seek to settle accounts with conventions, much as some filmmakers do when they turn dolls into serial killers.

Impromptu and Absurd, with its gallery of monsters, thus stands as the anti-salon of porcelain doll collectors. It feels as though the artists — mostly women — have sought to confront their past. The doll, initially designed for a child’s amusement, shifts here in purpose: it becomes a transitional object with a strong symbolic charge, and ultimately a work of art.

The exhibition brings together a wide range of materials used throughout history and across the world for both ritual and collectible dolls: terracotta, bone, silk, lace, papier-mâché, cardboard, porcelain, ceramic, fabric, plastic, wood, straw, wire, and hair.
It is hardly surprising that the eighty invited artists have given free rein to their imagination in recreating the beloved — or despised — doll of their childhood.

Impromptu in Lodève, they are now absurd in Montpellier. Whether they come from Korea, Switzerland, Spain, Brittany, Lozère, the Lodévois region, or Figuerolles, these dolls share one thing in common: they provoke strong reactions, from tenderness to rejection, passing through fear.
An Antifa figure with bared teeth, a little rabbit on its square of grass, Ken and Barbie in flesh and blood, Donkeyskin, nudists — here they are, large or tiny, fantastic, intriguing, cute or hideous, half-animal, totems, sirens, or monsters; crucified, dismantled, twisted, ill-fated, lost, horned, pot-bellied, naked — and even endowed with balls.

Created from scratch or customized, made of bits and pieces or meticulously crafted, each of them tells a story.
It is up to you to imagine it.